Komin turned the company around from Q2 2010 to Q1 2011, reversing the company’s high cash burn-rate and guiding it to record profitability as the head of the Global Technical Operations, QA, Customer Support, IT, HR, Legal, Finance and Accounting teams.

“As I promised if we couldn’t figure out a way that was a win/win for folks who want complete freedom vs. a list of last names, we wouldn’t do it. We couldn’t, so we wont,” wrote Rod Humble, in an update just a few minutes ago.

It must have been a sobering time for Linden Lab’s CEO, now just over a year in the big chair. Users served up information about practical history, and longer-term Lab functionaries served up shedloads of data to back up the users’ anecdotal information.

In the end, it seems, nobody could figure out a way to make Last Names come back without causing users more trouble than it was worth.